Decolonial Philosophy Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article contributes to recent work that has turned to Frantz
Fanon for a socio-ecological approach to racism and colonization. Its intervention is to take up Fanon to critically reflect on
the concept and use of “environmental racism,” one of the few
approaches we have to hand to interrogate the place of race
in discussions of the Anthropocene. It shows that a Fanonian
approach to environmental racism integrates a socio-ecological
perspective with decolonial political phenomenology. It uses
this position as a foundation to rethink environmental racism, reframing the problem in terms of racist environments.
Environmental racism can then be understood as a symptom of
a more fundamental problem with modes of experiencing and
organizing the world.

- by
- •
- Political Ecology, Frantz Fanon, Environmental Racism, Decolonial Philosophy

In his speech at the University of Dakar in July 2007, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Africa as the continent that has not yet fully entered history. This article takes this obvious reference to Hegel as its starting point and examines the current significance of ‘Hegel’s Africa’. Through a close reading of The Philosophy of History and The Phenomenology of Spirit, it shows that Hegel’s remarks on Africa are by no means incidental. They constitute rem(a)inders of a modernity that is based on the construction of Africa as its own limit. The return of Hegel’s Africa, the article concludes, can thus not be restricted to a problem of the new European right. It is part of an understanding of modernity that remains haunted by the specters of racism.

- by Patricia Purtschert
- •
- Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, Africa

The theme of the 2018 Spindel Conference was “Decolonizing Philosophy.” In this introduction, I will elaborate on this theme as a way to set the stage for the essays in this volume. Beginning with the question of what it means to consider philosophy “colonized” in the first place, I will focus on the subfield of the history of philosophy as a way to draw out my account. After elaborating what I take the claim that philosophy is colonized/colonizing to mean, I will turn to ways one might approach its decolonization. Again, my principle focus will be on the history of philosophy, though I take my analysis to extend beyond this subfield. Finally, I will elaborate four key tasks that I take to be essential to the decolonization of philosophy.

Registration is now open for a three-day conference – ‘In Search of Zera Yacob’ – to take place on 29 April - 1 May 2022 at the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre in Worcester College, University of Oxford in hybrid format. The conference will be... more

- by Lea Cantor and +2
- •
- African Philosophy, Ethiopian Studies, 17th Century Rationalism, Rationalism

This essay is about the loss of voice. It is about the ways in which the act of writing philosophy often results in an alienating and existentially meaningless experience for many budding philosophers, particularly those who wish to think... more

- by Grant J Silva
- •
- Latin American Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy Of Race, Africana Philosophy

This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres's formulation of the "decolonial reduction" as an instrument of phenomenology and ideological critique. Comparing the decolonial reduction to Edmund Husserl's notion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction or epoché, I argue that working through the demands of rigor for either mode of reduction points to areas of overlap: the work of transcendental phenomenology is incomplete without the performance of the decolonial reduction and vice versa. I then assess Maldonado-Torres's anchoring of the decolonial reduction in the spirit of the "decolonial attitude" and criticism of the Husserlian theoretical attitude. I conclude that foreclosing the theoretical attitude as a framework from which to perform the decolonial reduction implies significant limitations and pitfalls for the decolonial project.

- by Thomas Meagher
- •
- Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Husserl, Husserlian phenomenology

This paper examines methodological problems in political philosophy by way of an examination of the phenomenon of coloniality, animated by an analysis of Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo’s Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. I argue that rigorous political philosophy cannot involve narrowing one’s philosophical scope to either “ideal theory” or “nonideal theory,” as has become commonplace in contemporary Analytic philosophy. Sanín-Restrepo’s text is taken up as an exemplar of an approach in which the theoretical account of an ideal or ideals is worked out in relation to a critical account of political reality, and, hence, an account that restricts itself neither to ideal nor nonideal theory. Using Sanín-Restrepo’s account of coloniality, I defend the position that both ideal theory and nonideal theory in the Analytic tradition would manifest certain forms of disciplinary decadence due to their inattention to forms of epistemic and axiological colonization formative to Euromodern...

There are two modes for interpreting Maya Da-Rin's The Fever (2019, A Febre): the first, a "surface" reading of the pressures of assimilation faced by a small family of indigenous Desana descent who live on the outskirts of Manaus; the film also provides the lineaments of a metaphysical doctrine of Amerindian metaphysics and provides a pathway for applying this metaphysical doctrine within the social formations of international capitalism. In this paper, I provide sketches of both readings and focus on the themes of identity, the distinction between form and substance (including a fetishism at the heart of this distinction), and the film's ambiguous portrayal of the threats facing the local community and the film's protagonist.

- by Alex Adamson
- •
- Political Economy, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, CLR James